The word “Truth” was plastered all around the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning. At 9.30am, when the market opened, a small crowd stood on the balcony above the trading floor to ring in the day.
The group was celebrating the launch of five exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are tied to Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform that has spun into a menagerie of products over the last few years.
Under a parent organization, the Trump Media and Technology Group, Truth Social has been joined by a streaming platform, a nuclear fusion energy company and a growing slate of financial services products.
The ETFs are just the beginning of what will probably be a whole range of new financial products, especially related to crypto, rolled out this year all as the president continues to call back back to his promise to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”.
The Trump Media ETFs, which were officially launched on the stock exchange at the end of December, are being branded as “America First” funds, a kind of antithesis to the “woke” environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement that was popular in investment, particularly at the end of Trump’s first term.
Each of the five ETFs has a specific theme that centers Trump-branded patriotism: American-based companies, real estate in Republican-voting states, energy production and infrastructure, security and defense, and technology, including bitcoin.
ETFs – which are portfolios of assets, trading as a single investment vehicle – have rapidly risen in popularity in recent years. In 2025, new investments in ETFs reached $1.4tn, with a total of $13tn invested in the industry.
The “America First” ETFs are being managed by Yorkville America, a branch of Yorkville Advisors, an investment company based in New Jersey that has partnered with Trump Media in helping the company roll out its financial products. In 2024, Yorkville Advisors was involved in a $2.5bn fundraising round by Trump Media, and last year the investment company agreed to provide a $5bn line of credit to Trump Media and Crypto.com to form a new crypto treasury.
It’s a huge bet that Trump’s brand will be able to draw sustained financial interest. So far, the evidence has been mixed.
Truth Social, which the president still uses to fire off daily declarations and diatribes, has far fewer users than the social media giants that it was supposed to compete against. Trump Media, which is trading on Nasdaq, ballooned to over $60 per share in March 2024, during Trump’s presidential campaign, but is now trading closer to $14 per share. While Trump’s $Trump meme coin, which he promoted last January, soared in price to $45 a token around his inauguration, it has since dropped down to $5 a token.
The companies are also wading in uncharted waters around potential conflicts of interest that might arise when a sitting president is tied to such deep financial stakes.
Much of the company’s new ventures have launched over the last year, coinciding with Trump’s return to the White House, raising concerns among government ethics watchdogs about potential conflicts of interest that these new deals could create.
Before his inauguration, Trump put all his Trump Media shares into a revocable trust headed by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. Typically, US presidents put their financial interests into a blind trust, managed by an independent third party.
“The thing that’s guarding the president from getting involved in conflicts of interests and propping up the presidency are ethics norms,” said Kedric Payne, a former attorney at the office of congressional ethics. “That’s it. So if there are no ethics norms, there is no mechanism set up where you could have officials or agencies that are in charge of making the president comply with norms.”
In a letter sent to the US treasury on Tuesday, the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren requested that the office of the comptroller of the currency delay its review of a bank charter of World Liberty Financial, Trump Media’s digital asset company, which is trying to become a regulated crypto bank.
If the charter is approved, “for the first time in history, the president of the United States would be in charge of overseeing his own financial company”, Warren wrote.
Ethics watchdogs are especially concerned that people or companies looking to curry favor with Trump’s can simply invest in one of his company’s products. “The concern is if large investors purchase that financial product to win favor with him,” said Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center.
Questions have already been raised about Trump’s relationship with leaders in the crypto industry. Trump pardoned former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who invested $2bn in World Liberty Financial, and the SEC paused a federal investigation into Justin Sun, another crypto billionaire who bought $200m worth of Trump’s crypto token. (Sun has repeatedly maintained his innocence.) And while the Biden administration was investigating Trump Media partner Crypto.com, the inquiries stopped once Trump became president.
“There is absolutely no connection between the decision” and Crypto.com’s political activities, the company has said, adding that “any assertion to the contrary is entirely inaccurate”.
Meanwhile, the White House has said that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest”.
Trump was not at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, leaving the iconic bell ringing to Yorkville America.
He had rung the bell once before, though, after Time Magazine named him person of the year, in 2024. Standing on the balcony that day as CEOs chanted “USA! USA!” from below, Trump smiled as he gave them a message. “We’re with you all the way!” he said.
